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This paper surveys the rise and fall of the European mercantilist system, and thetransition to the modern, well-integrated international economy of the 19th century. Italso surveys the literature on the links between trade and economic growth during theperiod, and on the economic effects of empire.

This paper surveys the rise and fall of the European mercantilist system, and thetransition to the modern, well-integrated international economy of the 19th century. Italso surveys the literature on the links between trade and economic growth during theperiod, and on the economic effects of empire.

AbstractThis paper introduces a new dataset of commodity‐specific, bilateral import data for four large Asian economies in the interwar period: China, the Dutch East Indies, India and Japan. It uses these data to describe the interwar trade collapses in the economies concerned. These resembled the post‐2008 Great Trade Collapse in some respects but not in others: they occurred along the intensive margin, imports of cars were particularly badly affected, and imports of durable goods fell by more than those of non‐durables, except in China and India which were rapidly industrialising. On the other hand the import declines were geographically imbalanced, while prices were more important than quantities in driving the overall collapse.

International trade collapsed, and also became much less multilateral, during the 1930s. Previous studies, looking at aggregate trade flows, have argued that trade policies had relatively little to do with either phenomenon. Using a new dataset incorporating highly disaggregated information on the United Kingdom's imports and trade policies, we find that while conventional wisdom is correct regarding the impact of trade policy on the total value of British imports, discriminatory trade policies can explain the majority of Britain's shift toward Imperial imports in the 1930s. (JEL F13, F14, F54, N74)